Steve Jobs Quotes

My head had been shaved, I was wearing Indian cotton robes, and my skin had turned a deep, chocolate brown-red from the sun. So I’m sitting there and my parents walked past me about five times and finally my mother came up and said ‘Steve?’ and I said ‘Hi!’
Steve Jobs

Coming back to America was, for me, much more of a cultural shock than going to India. The people in the Indian countryside don’t use their intellect like we do, they use their intuition instead, and their intuition is far more developed than in the rest of the world. Intuition is a very powerful thing, more powerful than intellect, in my opinion. That’s had a big impact on my work.
Steve Jobs

Western rational thought is not an innate human characteristic; it is learned and is the great achievement of Western civilization. In the villages of India, they never learned it. They learned something else, which is in some ways just as valuable but in other ways is not. That’s the power of intuition and experiential wisdom.
Steve Jobs

Coming back after seven months in Indian villages, I saw the craziness of the Western world as well as its capacity for rational thought. If you just sit and observe, you will see how restless your mind is. If you try to calm it, it only makes it worse, but over time it does calm, and when it does, there’s room to hear more subtle things – that’s when your intuition starts to blossom and you start to see things more clearly and be in the present more. Your mind just slows down, and you see a tremendous expanse in the moment. You see so much more than you could see before. It’s a discipline; you have to practice it.
Steve Jobs

Zen has been a deep influence in my life ever since. At one point I was thinking about going to Japan and trying to get into the Eihei-ji monastery, by my spiritual advisor urged me to stay here. He said there is nothing over there that isn’t here, and he was correct. I learned the truth of the Zen saying that if you are willing to travel around the world to meet a teacher, one will appear next door.
Steve Jobs

I ended up spending as much time as I could with him [Kobun China Otogawa]. He had a wife who was a nurse at Stanford and two kids. She worked the night shift, so I would go over and hang out with him in the evenings. She would get home about midnight and shoo me away.
Steve Jobs

This was not something to think about. This was something to do: to close your eyes, hold your breath, jump in, and come out the other end more insightful.
Steve Jobs

There was just something going on here. The best music came from here – the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Joan Baez, Janis Joplin – and so did the integrated circuit, and things like the Whole Earth Catalog.
Steve Jobs

I was on one of my fruitarian diets. I had just come back from the apple farm. It sounded fun, spirited, and not intimidating. Apple took the edge off the world ‘computer’. Plus, it would get us ahead of Atari in the phone book.
Steve Jobs

Woz was very bright in some areas, but he’s almost like a savant, since he was so stunted when it came to dealing with people he didn’t know. We were a good pair.
Steve Jobs

I would plug each assembled board into the TV and keyboard to test it to see if it worked. If it did, I put it in a box. If it didn’t, I’d figure out what pin hadn’t gotten into the socket right.
Steve Jobs

I’m a fruitarian and I will only eat leaves picked by virgins in the moonlight.
Steve Jobs

We were able to build the boards more cheaply than we thought, because I got a good deal on parts. So the fifty we sold to the Byte Shop almost paid for all the material we needed to make a hundred boards.
Steve Jobs

If we can rap about their needs, feelings and motivations, we can respond appropriately by giving them what they want.
Steve Jobs

My vision was to create the first fully packaged computer. We were no longer aiming for the handful of hobbyists who liked to assemble their own computers, who knew how to buy transformers and keyboards. For every one of them there were a thousand people who would want the machine to be ready to run.
Steve Jobs

[To Chuck Peddle of Commodore computers] You might want to buy us for a few hundred thousand dollars.
Steve Jobs

[To Woz on ownership of Apple] If we’re not fifty-fifty, you can have the whole things.
Steve Jobs

Al turned me on to this brilliant guy named Rod Holt, who was a chain-smoking Marxist who had been through many marriages and was an expert on everything.
Steve Jobs

That switching power supply was as revolutionary as the Apple II logic board was. Rod [Holt] doesn’t get a lot of credit for this in the history books, but he should. Every computer now uses switching power supplies, and they all rip off Rod’s design.
Steve Jobs

The tooling of this plastic case was going to costs, like $100,000. Just to get this whole thing into production was going to be, like $200,000.
Steve Jobs

He [Mike Markkula] was short and he had been passed over for the top marketing job at Intel, which I suspect made him want to prove himself. You could tell that if he could screw you, he wouldn’t. He had a real moral sense to him.
Steve Jobs

We made a lot of assumptions, such as about how many houses would have a personal computer, and there were nights we were up until 4 a.m.
Steve Jobs

I thought it was unlikely that Mike would ever see that $250,000 again, and I was impressed that he was willing to risk it.
Steve Jobs

Mike [Markkula] really took me under his wing. His values were much aligned with mine. He emphasized that you should never start a company with the goal of getting rich. Your goal should be making something you believe in and making a company that will last.
Steve Jobs

When you open the box of an iPhone or iPad, we want that tactile experience to set the tone for how you perceive the product. Mike [Markkula] taught me that.
Steve Jobs

I asked them what Regis McKenna was, and they told me he was a person.
Steve Jobs